SOURCE: Gitlin, Todd. “Millennial Mumbo Jumbo.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (27 April 1997): 8.

In the following excerpt, Gitlin commends Showalter's cultural analysis of texts and fads in Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture, but finds shortcomings in her selective approach and tendency toward “ultra-Freudian logic.”

Headlong passion was always said to be female, while men, even as they lost their heads, were supposed to be cool. Throughout history, men have been the accusers, diagnosticians and judges, women the witches, patients and victims. Today, allegations of satanic abuse, extraterrestrial abduction, multiple personality and chronic fatigue tend to come from women too. What is new is that, curiously, many of these charges come from feminists apparently more committed to unearthing evidence of their own frailty than to claiming their human powers.

Elaine Showalter, Avalon Foundation professor of the humanities and a professor of English at Princeton University, a historian of medicine...